Configuration management is a key feature of software defined networking (SDN) in a datacenter. For a typical network management system, many types of entities require configurations and there are many types of configurations for these entities (e.g., security configurations, feature-specific configurations, forwarding configurations, etc.). Because there are so many entities in a typical SDN, changing the configuration settings for a large group of entities (e.g., hundreds of logical ports) can be a time- and resource-intensive process, both on the front-end (the administrator making these changes) and the back-end (the network management system propagating all the changes to the appropriate physical hosts).